Louis Lachenal learned at Wheatstone.

Louis Lachenal (c.1821–1861) was a Swiss craftsman, still in his late teens, who came to Britain in 1839 and went to work for Wheatstone in the early 1840s, according to the Concertina Museum’s history, now hosted by the International Concertina Association. By 1847 he was making complete instruments for Wheatstone, not just parts. The Wheatstone factory ledgers at the Horniman Museum list him among the paid employees who “later left the Wheatstone factory to set up their own concertina workshops, in competition with the parent company.”

He waited, patiently, for the patent to run out first. Lachenal began making concertinas under his own name in 1858, the year Wheatstone’s 1844 patent expired. He died only three years later, in 1861, aged about forty, and his widow, Elisabeth, ran the business.

In 1872 she transferred ownership to the firm’s own employees, creating Lachenal & Co. — so the “& Co.” firm postdates its founder. By 1883 its owners included Richard Ballinger, Louis Charrière, T.W. and John Saunders, W.B. Fisher and Charles Crabb, and by 1907 the Saunders family owned it outright.

Duets, an Edeophone, and a closure.

Lachenal’s workshop, under its later owners, was inventive. It made the Crane duet for Crane of Liverpool, and in the 1880s and 1890s developed the Maccann duet, a bowing valve and the twelve-sided Edeophone, according to the Concertina Museum history. Its output was large: one estimate, from the folk charity EATMT, puts it at about 250,000 instruments; a serial-number study by Stephen Chambers is the more detailed source.

The firm, after some seventy-five years of trading in London, closed in the 1930s. The Concertina Museum history says it “finally closed in 1933”; Wikipedia gives production as roughly 1850 to 1936. Under our rule for defunct businesses we say it plainly: Lachenal & Co. closed in the 1930s, and we found no current maker trading under the name.

One later name links Lachenal to another family in this round: a Charles Crabb was among its owners in 1883, and a Charles Crabb had worked at Wheatstone in the 1830s with his brother John, whose family went on to run an Islington concertina business for more than a century. We do not assume the two Charleses are the same man.

A trade that grew out of one factory.

The concertina’s paper trail starts with patents. Charles Wheatstone’s British Patent No. 5803 of 1829, “Improvements in the Construction of Wind Musical Instruments,” covered the symphonium — which the Whipple Museum in Cambridge calls “the precursor to his better known invention, the English concertina” — and the reference site concertina.com notes it is “The first of the Wheatstone patents to show a concertina, even though the word is not used.” His Patent No. 10041 of 1844, “Improvements in the Action of the Concertina, &c. by Vibrating Springs,” was, the same site says, “The most important of the concertina patents, establishing the characteristic features of the English concertina.”

Much of what we know about the London trade comes from one firm’s books. In 1996 the Horniman Museum in London bought “almost all the contents of the Concertina Museum in Belper, Derbyshire,” more than six hundred free-reed instruments, its keeper of musical instruments, Margaret Birley, writes. “Among the highlights are twelve ledgers from the C. Wheatstone & Co. concertina factory dating from 1834 to 1891,” saved from destruction by a manager, Henry Minting. The ledgers “chart the weekly wages paid to employees such as Messrs Lachenal, Dove, Chidley and Nickolds, all of whom later left the Wheatstone factory to set up their own concertina workshops, in competition with the parent company.”

There are three main systems. The International Concertina Association explains that on the English concertina “Each button plays one note – the same whether pulling or pushing the button,” while “Anglos are bisonoric: each button sounds two different notes, depending on whether the bellows are compressed (pushed) or opened (pulled),” and duets play the same note in both directions with higher notes on the right. The Anglo, it says, “is popular for Irish traditional music and for Morris and other traditional dance forms”; the historian Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin writes that “the Anglo-German concertina arrived in Clare during the middle decades of the nineteenth century.”

The Horniman also holds later Wheatstone ledgers, covering 1910 to 1974, lent by the present owner of the name, Steve Dickinson; together, the museum says, the notebooks chronicle production “from 1834 to 1974 — albeit with some gaps.”

Of the London names, only Wheatstone still has a working owner: Steve Dickinson, a concertina maker who bought it in 1975 and trades as C. Wheatstone & Co. from Stowmarket in Suffolk. Jeffries, the Praed Street family firm, left no price list, brochure or advertisement that anyone has found, yet modern makers still cite its Anglos as their models.

Among modern makers, Colin Dipper has restored and made concertinas in Wiltshire since the mid-1960s, Jürgen Suttner in Siegen says he has made about 1,100, and The Button Box in Massachusetts made R. Morse & Co. concertinas from 1999 until about 2022.

Jeffries, the Praed Street family firm, left no price list, brochure or advertisement that anyone has found, yet modern makers still cite its Anglos as their models. Lachenal’s timing tells its own story: by starting under his own name in 1858, the year Wheatstone’s 1844 patent expired, he entered the market as soon as the law allowed.

A Swiss name on London concertinas.

Lachenal’s brand was its founder’s surname, kept by the employees and the Saunders family who owned the firm after his death. It is a name that outlived its man by seventy years, carried by people who had worked alongside him and by a family that bought into the firm.

For a design guide, Lachenal shows a breakaway brand built by a former employee — and then handed to the workforce. Compare Wheatstone, the firm it left, and Crabb, another Wheatstone-trained family whose name was briefly on Lachenal’s ownership list.

For this guide we use a mahogany and a blush with a serif, an unofficial interpretation. No instrument, label or mark is reproduced.

Keep Lachenal & Co.’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.